by Robert B. Youngblood
[Bob Youngblood, an emeritus professor at my undergrad alma mater, was one of my German profs and, as he says below, was an avid supporter and participant in the university theater program. Both Bob and our university theater director were new the same semester I started my freshman year, not much older than I was, so we all became friendly even as students and faculty. After I graduated, Bob and Lee Kahn, the director, became more like social acquaintances with common interests than teachers and a former student and we kept in touch all these years. (Lee died at 46 in 1981 but I’m still in touch with his widow.) In one e-mail message Bob sent me, he broached the topic of the disappearance of theater at my alma mater and I published “Disappearing Theater” on ROT on 19 July 2010. “The Theater Problem” is Bob’s view of this same disheartening phenomenon from the inside. ~Rick]
For three decades of my teaching career at Washington and Lee University as a professor of German and Italian, I taught two large literature classes of modern foreign literature in English translation, a component course in those required for graduation. The fall semester course was on modern German literature (from Rainer Maria Rilke to Thomas Bernhard and Ingo Schulze) and the winter semester course was on modern Italian literature (from Giovanni Verga to Antonio Tabucchi and Erri De Luca). The prose portions of the course could usually proceed with surmountable problems. Poetry and drama in both courses, on the other hand, were very bumpy roads indeed. This essay addresses "the theater problem."
It was, of course, my job to teach plays by dramatists that were aesthetically complex and by authors too contemporary for the students even to know their names (plays like Offending the Public by Peter Handke and Ten Rooms by Botho Strauss in German, Emma B. Widow Jocasta by Alberto Savinio and The Accidental Death of an Anarchist by Dario Fo in Italian, for example). Theater-lover that I am, I relished the task of presenting plays by these and other playwrights. Because I could automatically and rightly assume that every student was a tabula rasa about the plays, performance techniques, and the contemporary theater scenes in Germany and Italy, these modernist/postmodernist playwrights were less of an obstacle to teach . So ultra-modernism wasn't the problem.
What depressed me (and up to retirement brought me close to despondency) was that students, over the years, gradually came to have virtually no background in post-Elizabethan play-reading and had only attended either very few or no plays at all in a theater proper.
Naturally, I didn't expect students, even at our ultra-selective private liberal arts college, to be familiar with the playwrights generally considered the European forerunners of modern drama: Büchner, Ibsen, Strindberg, Hauptmann, Chekhov, Wedekind, Pirandello, Shaw, and Brecht. Given, however, the notorious U.S.-centered cultural isolation our students are taught in, I expected most of them to have read or seen Thornton Wilder's Our Town or Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, or failing that, to have heard of at least one play by Eugene O'Neill. In my last teaching years, the only playwright that most students could name or profess familiarity with one or the other of his major plays was (as one might expect) Tennessee Williams. In his case, students were able to name, said they knew about, or had seen (the movie version of) A Streetcar Named Desire.
In response to this distressing situation, I would ask students why they hadn't read or seen canonical plays. Surely their high school put on at least a play a year and they took part in or saw it? Oh yes, they replied, and named musicals that were performed or they took part in! To that, I would ask if they had acted in or seen any of the outstanding musicals like Cabaret, Into the Woods, or Sweeney Todd that consider serious themes and offers intellectual challenges rather than just issue-free entertainment. That question would net me a blank look, but they assured me they knew musicals by Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hammerstein, the Gershwin Brothers, some of the classics up to the 1950s.
My follow-up question would then be: Why they didn't go to plays. The answers would run along these lines: We live in the suburbs. The theaters are downtown. Plays are at night when downtown is dangerous. We don't go down there. To my follow-up question, what about matinees on the weekend, again no answer. Weekends, as we in the teaching profession know, are for sleeping late and partying. And, given the "stuff" they see on DVDs and TV, to expect them to sit through a play of two or three hours, which has few scene changes and which requires a cerebral commitment, is asking a lot of today's young people. It's all students can do to sit through a lecture of an hour between their cell phone calls and text messages.
But there's film, I would counter. There are lots of plays on film. There are, for example, at least three different film versions of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, that quintessential American play. In response to the word "film," they would tell me how many plays by Shakespeare they had seen in English class. Ah, I thought, here's where they experienced the translation of text into image and sound. It would often turn out, however, that they had only read one complete play by Shakespeare (usually Romeo and Juliet; if a second one, usually Richard III). Frequently they just read extrapolated scenes in class and later watched a film of the play (alas, I can't remember hearing Othello, Julius Caesar, King Lear mentioned).
Given their lack of at least theater attendance, I shouldn't have been disappointed at the following, but invariably was: At least one oral report was required per course; I would suggest the setting of a scene in a play read for a class. Although I would give a verbal example of a scene-setting or diagram one on the blackboard, students would either tell me, to my disappointment, that they were unable or found it very difficult to set or diagram a scene. I expected them to know, but most also didn't, what a sound stage was in movie-making.
Despite the dispiriting, near absence, of theater background that students all too often came to W&L with from high school, this idealistic and theater-passionate instructor threw himself willingly into the breach. His abiding hope was that the plays treated in his courses would at least awaken an interest in theater and prod students to attend performances at W&L. Alas, this was not the case. A colleague who conducted an exiting-senior survey for years found, in the last year he did, that only one third of the senior class had attended a single play at W&L.
I personally had some of my most significant experiences at W&L with colleague-directors in our university theater. I contributed to a contemporary version of Six Characters in Search of an Author, to characterization and Brechtian elements in Saint Joan of the Stockyards, and to a major production of Goethe's Faust (both parts!) which played to virtually full houses. The programming of plays at W&L tried to present at least one representative play from the principle periods in the canon over a student's four years at W&L. Unfortunately, this college has eliminated virtually all play production. The two stages of our impressive and still fairly new performing arts complex were virtually barren of plays. This is not only due to the economic downturn but also because of low student participation in this art form. Up to the last year of performances, W&L wound up playing to primarily non-student audiences.
It comes as no surprise to me that theater in the U.S. has been experiencing a "hard go of it" in the years I've been a witness to the drop-off of live theater experiences and play-reading in our high schools. If, to boot, our colleges aren't educating and producing a new generation of play-going audiences, the future of theater in these altogether troubled United States looks even bleaker still!
[Bob was, as he describes himself, “theater-passionate,” but he doesn’t make his living in the theater, either as an artist or as a teacher, so his lament is perhaps a more unbiased cri than was my own. I could be seen to have had a conflict of interest, an axe to grind—but Bob’s loss is purely from the perspective of someone who loves (and misses) theater and a teacher in a liberal arts college who sees the loss to the students’ fundamental education. His final statement, that “the future of theater in these altogether troubled United States looks even bleaker still” if colleges like W&L stop teaching and presenting theater because we would no longer be “educating and producing a new generation of play-going audiences,” is something that I’ve said myself numerous times. In “Degrading the Arts” (13 August 2009), I make the same point Bob does in “The Theater Problem,” for instance, but the issue comes up often. It’s shameful, in my view, that arts education at any academic level in this country should become a question of finances or head-count. It’s even worse when the school or the board of ed takes the tack of eliminating theater or other art program in the face of low student turn-out rather than doing everything they can to raise that student interest, promote the arts on campus, and boost the benefits and pleasures of the arts.
[In “Disappearing Theater,” I quoted from a letter George Washington, the principal benefactor of the young Washington Academy (which grew into Washington and Lee University), wrote to the school’s trustees in 1798. The former president of the United States insisted: "[T]o encourage the Arts [has] ever been amongst the warmest wishes of my heart." I’ll also quote another great American, Chester A. Riley (as portrayed on TV by William Bendix): "What a revoltin' development this is!" I say, shame on everyone involved. Discretion may be considered valorous, but cowardice and burying your head in the sand are no virtues. Shame!]
Showing posts with label college. Show all posts
Showing posts with label college. Show all posts
21 November 2011
24 July 2010
Liberal Arts in the Real World
When I was teaching writing back in the mid-1980s, a student asked, “Is there value in a liberal arts education?” The question was a response to a request for my writing classes to suggest topics of interest to them. While most of her classmates proposed issues of more portent, such as divestiture of South African investments, rating rock-music lyrics, and the treatment of AIDS patients, this student found that question significant. It made me think: How would I answer her question myself? I’m the proud possessor of a liberal arts degree; many of the people I know and work with are, too. What is the value of a liberal arts education? The practical value, not the one that says, “It teaches you to think” (even though I believe it does).
This question, which makes me reflect on my four undergrad years, must also be of real concern to every member of a liberal arts school’s student body, faculty, and administration. Their major purpose is to provide a liberal education to thousands of young people every year, and to graduate many hundred products of that process out into the world. I never had much cause to doubt the value of my degree over the years, though it never got me a job or earned me a cent. It was simply part of what I am. But what good did it do me? Why am I better for having it?
Actually, in a way, I did question the idea of liberal arts schooling while I was still in college. One of my roommates, a science major who wanted to be a doctor (and became one), was frustrated because he was required to take a number of humanities courses. He couldn’t understand why he had to dilute his scientific specialization with useless classes in literature and languages. He wasn’t the least bit interested in being “well-rounded”; he was going to be a scientist. I, on the other hand, was equally frustrated because I was being forced by the same university requirements to pick a major. (We had a heated discussion about this dichotomy one night.) I thought I’d be limited to taking the bulk of my classes within one area, and that rankled me. I wanted to be free to wander all through the catalogue. Fortunately, I found a way to have my cake and eat it, too. But what did my serendipity get me?
Looking back over the years since I left undergraduate school, I find that I have a peculiar vantage point from which to judge the value of what I received there. Not only have I been both a student and a teacher, which allows me to look, Janus-like, in both directions, but my experiences cover a rather broad spectrum. I’ve been able to test the worth of my liberal arts background against a variety of touchstones to see if it proved to be gold, or so much intellectual dross. I’m satisfied it turned out, if you’ll pardon the expression, to be golden.
My first experience of the world beyond school was the army where there are three kinds of officers: academy grads, field commissions, and ROTC officers. ROTC officers like me comprised about 85% of the officer corps at that time and most were products of non-military, liberal arts colleges. (Cadets at VMI and the Citadel also receive reserve commissions on graduation.) It was my experience that most ROTC officers, not having what we used to call a “military mind,” approached their duties in a more human and often more efficient way, treating their subordinates as people who happened to be soldiers, rather than the reverse. (We reserve officers used to describe ourselves as “civilians TDY to the army.” It wasn’t entirely a joke.) I noticed far less resentment and hostility among enlisted men and women for this kind of officer than for the more doctrinarian alternative. This observation received unlikely confirmation from a sergeant major who told me he preferred to work for ROTC officers because they were more likely to take time to observe the operation of a unit to which they’d been assigned, and to work with the people rather than issue orders from a training manual. In another demonstration of the worth of a humanities background, my CO often complimented me on my reports and written documents (the stock-in-trade of an MI office: the typing instructor at the intel school called the typewriter “an MI agent’s weapon”) because they conveyed all the necessary information in ordinary prose that didn’t sound like a military text.
Out of the army and studying acting in New York, I found myself among people with varied backgrounds. Many of the young actors with whom I studied and worked had been theater majors in college—some even as early as high school. I invariably found these actors limited not only in their artistic abilities, but, more importantly, in their general knowledge of literature, history, philosophy, and science. This had two repercussions in their work. First, they had less factual knowledge on which to draw when studying a role and, second, they had a narrower basis for their experience of life—an experience that is indispensable for any artist, particularly an actor. The best actors with whom I worked had all had the most eclectic intellectual backgrounds, though not all got them from college. (Many of the actors I met, especially the older ones, were self-educated. Others had studied diverse fields in school, including chemistry, law, and history—and one or two former divinity students.)
My own work as an actor and director is riddled with incidents where I drew on the most improbable knowledge. At rehearsals for The Skin of Our Teeth, for instance, I gave informal talks on animal biology (especially phylogeny, though I never used that word). As an actor in a production of Anouilh’s Romeo and Jeannette, the director asked me to read the original French text to see if there was anything useful for our production (and there was); I had a similar assignment from the director of Chekhov’s The Wood Demon for the Russian version. In a theater appreciation class where we were reading Alice Childress’s Wedding Band, which is set in 1918, I found that I had to explain to my students that an unnamed illness that was ravaging the characters in the play, including the male lead, was the Spanish flu pandemic that ravaged the country after World War I. Actors without a broad background have to acquire one on their own; those who never do are severely limited in their range and often produce shallow, superficial characters. While a liberal arts education cannot produce talent, ignorant actors cannot make full use of the talent they have.
Back at school for graduate work, I found myself again drawing on my liberal arts background. My doctoral department was eclectic itself, taking a kind of sociological-anthropological approach to performance; my broad-based education, filtered through my experiences in life and theater, again put me in a good position. Without the accumulated general knowledge built on my undergrad foundation, I would not have enjoyed myself so much, or done nearly so well.
Once when I was auditing Richard Schechner's Theories of Directing, I was astonished at the spectrum of fields covered in one session. The discussion focused on Vsevelod Meyerhold, the experimental Russian director. While it isn't unusual for visionary artists like Meyerhold to use eclectic interests and inspiration in their work, this class struck me as more far-ranging than any other I could recall. Schechner started off with a précis of Russian history from 1914 through the revolution and civil war to the rise of Stalin. From then on, the class touched, occasionally in some detail, on the form and philosophy of Socialist Realism and the works of van Gogh and Picasso; planetary orbits and the effects of gravity; ellipses and parabolas; the rise of the stage director; time-and-motion studies, Taylorism and industrialism; and Jean-Paul Sartre's belief that "Death converts every life to a destiny." That makes seven academic disciplines covered in one three-hour class: history, art history, astronomy and physics, geometry, theater history, social history, and philosophy. And those were only the major fields. Now, I can't say that I knew all about all these topics—Taylorism was new to me, for one—but I had a passing familiarity with most of them, enough, at least, to put them together with the main focus of the discussion.
This experience also illustrates what I’ve often tried to explain to my theater students: you can't really work in the theater successfully without at least an introduction to every other field of human intellectual endeavor. I once advised, unsuccessfully, a young student actor not to pass up a trip to Paris for a role (in the chorus) in a community-theater show. There would always be another community production, and a trip to Paris would benefit her forever. Paradoxically, a student who studies only theater—no matter how extensively—is no theater student.
In conjunction with my graduate studies, I worked in dramaturgy, a theater profession in which the broadest knowledge is necessary. The job of a dramaturg or literary manager may include reading and evaluating new plays; working with playwrights; translating plays and adapting non-dramatic texts; writing program notes; working with a director on a cohesive production concept; compiling historical, sociological, cultural, and political information about a play’s milieu or the playwright’s biography; providing in-house criticism; and planning lobby displays, educational outreach, and study guides. You don’t get the breadth of knowledge necessary to fulfill that kind of job from a specialized education.
I also taught undergraduate writing while I was a grad student, though I’d never previously studied or taught writing. On what experience do you suppose I drew? During the course, I led discussions on Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Albert Camus. My students wrote papers on, to name just a few topics, the creative impulse, Greek architecture, sports, Protestant fundamentalists, computer security, Soviet theater, and euthanasia. Without a liberal arts background, I could never have evaluated the work of my student writers—I wouldn’t have been able to understand what any of them was talking about.
After I finished my Ph. D. coursework, I found myself in a situation that proved to be the clearest example of the importance of a liberal education. I was hired as a part-time teacher of English and theater at a New Jersey high school. The theater class I taught obviously drew on my professional experience and training, but the English class required me to reach back into the general education I got in college nearly 20 years before. I started my ninth-graders off with Inherit the Wind, the dramatization of the 1925 Tennessee trial in which high school science teacher John Scopes was tried for teaching Darwin in violation of the state law. Over the weeks we worked on the play, I covered not only Darwin and evolution, the biblical story of creation, and the history of the actual trial, but the U.S. Supreme Court, our legal system, several constitutional provisions, newspaper reporting, basic biology, and a handful of other minor topics that cropped up now and then. (Let me point out that I covered those topics in class because they’re in the play—either in the text itself or in the atmosphere surrounding the plot and characters. Any actor or director who works on Inherit the Wind would do well to have a passing acquaintanceship with all those subjects, too.) Since we also spoke about other writings from time to time, questions and discussions occasionally ranged far beyond these topics, too. I found myself remembering things I hadn't thought about since college, and even since high school. Never before had I been so conscious of what I know and don't know.
Nowadays, I spend a lot of energy and time on ROT. Whatever its quality, I’m pretty confident that I cover a pretty broad range of topics and issues. Even in those articles that deal with theatrical matters there are discussions or passing mentions of an array of other subjects. Whatever I’ve been able to put together here, whatever connections I’ve made between ideas and trends, I was able to see them because of that liberal arts background. Whatever experience I’ve drawn on when I write for ROT (or any other outlet, for that matter) has been affected by the intellectual training I got 45 years ago and which has driven me to learn whatever I’ve learned since.
I thank heaven every day for my liberal arts education. Obviously, I never anticipated ending up in front of a high-school English class when I was in college, so I couldn't have prepared for that situation. The lesson, I think, is that the kind of education a liberal arts college provides is preparation for even some totally unlooked-for circumstances 20, 30, 40 years down the road. Now that's value for money! Soldier, actor, director, dramaturg, student, teacher: in all these capacities, and several shorter-lived ones as well, I couldn’t have gotten by without the broad, general background of the liberal arts degree—and those distribution credits my roommate wanted to avoid, plus the courses I took just because I was curious. Whatever little success I’ve made of my life, it all comes from that. Forced to think about it, I’m mighty glad I took the path I did at college. In this overspecialized, narrow-based world, a liberal education humanizes us.
[A version of this article was published as "Real-World Liberal Arts" in the Alumni Magazine of Washington and Lee (February 1986).]
19 July 2010
Disappearing Theater
When Kirk and I were students in Lexington, W&L theater was a kind of orphan. There was no theater department (there as a Fine Arts Department) and the entire theater staff consisted of one man, Lee Kahn, the university theater director, who ran the small theater, directed the shows, scheduled the season, oversaw the set designs, maintained the rudimentary shop (where both Kirk and I worked briefly between graduation and military service), taught the classes, managed the box office and subscriptions, and everything else that was required to make live theater a presence on the W&L campus.
And he succeeded magnificently. Before Lee arrived in 1965, the same year Kirk and I did, W&L theater was mostly uninteresting and attracted little attention among the students (who got free seats as part of their Student Activities Fee). The fare in the ‘50s and the first half of the ‘60s had been mostly old chestnuts, almost nothing current, and the audiences were almost exclusively the little old ladies of Lexington. (From what Kirk tells me, the ‘30s was more interesting from many perspectives. His father, like mine, was an alumnus of W&L—in fact, our fathers were also classmates—and Kirk’s dad told him anecdotes of his own theater experiences at the Troubadour Theatre in the years before World War II.) Then Lee arrived, a young man (he was only 30) with a taste for challenging theater. He staged Waiting for Godot, his very first Troub production as I recall, and Richard II; Exit the King and The Homecoming; an adaptation of The Bacchants by a chemistry prof and the first student-written play seen on the Troubadour Theatre stage. And he produced the Marat/Sade while it was still running in New York. (W&L had been the first non-professional application for the rights to Peter Weiss’s play. Later Lee presented Equus before it was even released for amateur productions. He just couldn’t wait.) After the first or second of these challenging plays, the townie audience began to stay away—they were frankly scared—but students began coming around. (I’ll never forget one reported remark from a townie spectator after Marat/Sade, at the end of which the inmates of the asylum riot and scramble out into the auditorium: “If I want to see this kind of thing, I’ll stay home!”) Soon, it was hard to get reservations (admission was free, but no one was guaranteed a seat during the two-weekend runs), and proportionally there were nearly as many students who wanted to bring their dates to a Troub play in the evening as took them to the football games on weekend afternoons. Some students and their dates were turned away. The word got around—things were happening down on Red Square (so called because of the four big, red-brick frat houses that dominated the block) where the old Civil War shoe factory that housed the university theater stood.
That little building, which rumor always had it had been a brothel once upon a time as well, was barely adequate. It had no fly space to speak of, no right wing at all (beyond the stage-right wall was Henry Street), and the left wing was the stairway to the upstairs plus the shop. The backstage area, behind the set, was barely wide enough for an actor or techie to pass through without jiggling the rear wall of the set. (Right outside the theater’s back wall was Main Street. In fact, there was a disused door in that wall which from the exterior looked like the main entrance to the building—which it probably was in an earlier incarnation.) The dressing room—there was only one—was upstairs and served as the green room as well. But in this totally inadequate and inflexible space, Lee and the Troubs put on some marvelous productions. I spent some of the best hours I had in Lexington in the darkened house of the Troubs or on its stage. It wasn’t just interesting and informative—I learned a lot of what I still believe about theater in those days—but exciting. Godot was eye-opening—and Marat/Sade was mind-blowing. And one man made all this happen back then: Lee Kahn. Not only was he all there was, but he was the kind of personality that made such things happen—on stage and in the heads and hearts of students.
There was no theater department, as I said—Lee would help launch one in the years after I graduated—so all of the participants were from other disciplines. I was a German-French major, for instance, and Kirk was an English major. (There were also no women in W&L’s undergrad student body; it was an all-male college until the ‘80s. There were a handful of students’ wives and the occasional faculty wife with theatrical aspirations, but most of the women in our shows were recruited from the women’s schools in nearby central Virginia.) Lee offered one single-semester class in acting and one in directing; there was a theater history course and, if there was demand, a technical theater class. (In the years after Kirk and I graduated, Lee hired a TD who ran the shop when the two of us worked there in the fall of 1969.) None of us had much practical experience—a little amateur acting maybe and some high school theater, but there was no depth in Lee’s bench and he always drew a credible, and often superb, performance out of his raw talent—even if it was minimal or limited.
In the years after I left W&L, the school launched a theater department, expanding the course offerings and the activities in which students could participate, such as student-directed plays and student-written scripts. The university went co-ed in 1985; it was still a small school (about 1500 undergraduates, more or less) but the population eventually became about half women and half men. (Women had been law students since 1972.) In 1991, the Lenfest Center, a large, state-of-the-art performing arts center, was opened, a project on which my father, a committed W&L alum, was very active—in great part because of my special interest in theater and our friendship with Lee and Betty Kahn. The active theater department and the performing arts center were in great part tributes to Lee, who died of cancer in 1981 at the age of 46. If it weren’t for him, there would never have been a theater department or a Lenfest Center. He made them both necessary because he made campus theater a cultural and educational force that demanded attention and support.
Lee was succeeded by Al Gordon, the first chairman of the new department (whom Lee in effect hired as his own boss). Gordon was a music-theater specialist, but the emphasis on new and striking theater continued. (The Lenfest Center opened with a production of Evita, which had only closed on Broadway in 1983. In more recent years, Gordon, who’s now emeritus, staged Goethe’s Faust and other theatrically interesting projects, such as Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses just before he retired.) But somewhere between the end of Gordon’s tenure and the current chairmanship of Joe Martinez, something began to slip. Students stopped coming to the plays. I’m of the opinion that the plays or productions were no longer exciting to the student audiences and that that was the fault of the theater faculty, who selected and staged the plays. Bob Youngblood offers a supplemental reason for the drop-off in attendance and attention: the students themselves. First, he points out, “They’re the DVD generation.” He was one of my German profs and later taught Italian (which wasn’t offered in my day) and he took students on trips to Europe during the spring semesters. On a trip to Italy, he reports, he couldn’t get the students to take in the Umbrian countryside through which they were traveling because they were all watching videos on their laptops. Second, Bob says, “It's not their fault that they haven't been prepared for aesthetic experiences of any sort—artistic, musical, theatrical. . . . Drinking parties are attraction #1 . . . .”
A former Lexingtonian who had connections to the theater program when Kirk and I were there—and is now a professional stage manager in St. Louis—affirms that “it’s not the same as in our day for sure,” but she also asserts that “there is a lot more student participation in directing and playwriting” now than there was before the theater department was established. According to Bob, the dance and music programs continue because they charge admission so that the university doesn’t bear the whole cost of presenting concerts and dance series. Booked-in shows are also still offered; they also charge admission and aren’t subsidized by the school—but they don’t use student artists, either. There just aren’t anywhere near as many departmental productions with student participation as there was even just a few years ago. “The Golden Age is over, I agree,” concludes the Lexington native (who still has family there and stays in contact with the Lexington scene), and Bob characterizes the present state of W&L theater with the lament: “These are indeed hard times for theater at your alma mater.” Lee Kahn managed to engage the students 45 years ago—and we had our distractions at the end of the ‘60s, too—and he was only one man. But, Bob admonishes, “we can't apply our past to the present, alas.” “You're talking about your and my generation,” he adds; today’s students are interested in two things from college: “a social life” and “a high-5-figure job (a 6-figure one, if they luck out).” Intellectual and cultural growth isn’t on the agenda, it seems. He may be right; he’s taught these young people and he’s probably got a bead on their mindset. But I say that, given the recalcitrance of 21st-century college students, it’s still the faculty’s responsibility to find ways to engage them, overcome the electronic pastimes that distract the attentions of the students they’re supposed to be educating. If what you’re offering doesn’t engage them, doesn’t compete with DVD’s and the ‘Net, then change what you’re offering. Giving up the struggle altogether, throwing in the towel is the worst possible tactic. No one wins then—neither the students nor the university nor society at large. You can’t just throw up your hands and quit, with the excuse that it’s not cost-effective to offer plays to a student body who doesn’t come to the theater.
Bob writes sadly of the few students he had during the last years he taught—around the turn of the millennium—who weren’t taking the course “to satisfy the general ed. requirement.” This made me remember my undergrad curriculum. I’d gotten lucky: I got two years advanced placement in both French and German so that I was taking junior-level courses in my first semester. It was an obvious choice that I’d major in either French or German since I was already accumulating credits, but which of the two was my best choice? One of my German professors explained that I could major in both languages and not take additional courses for either program. The French classes counted as “cognate” credits for the German major and vice versa. I needed only to take one course in each language each term—which I would have done anyway. Because I would fulfill all the requirements for both majors and the distribution creds without taking a full load each semester, I could take courses purely out of interest and curiosity. So that’s what I did. I took courses in psych, sociology, philosophy, linguistics, several comp lit classes (Russian Lit in Translation, Modern Theater in Translation—known as Play-A-Day), as well as the one-semester classes in acting and directing and the two years then offered in Russian. (Okay, yes. I’m a geek. I took French, German, and Russian in college. And I loved every damned minute of it!) My point: Far from taking courses I didn’t want to just to satisfy a requirement, I took classes for no reason other than that I was curious about the subject. Because I could. I was in college to find out about stuff I didn’t know! I was monumentally curious, and college was an intellectual toy store. I couldn’t have had it better. Now, no one told me to do that—my German prof helped me see a way to do it—but that’s what the university ought to be doing now: figuring out how to encourage W&L students to partake in the vast array of intellectual and cultural pursuits available, including theater. (Ask me and I’ll tell ya, ‘above all theater,’ but that’s just me.) As Bob says, if they don’t see theater at home, as many students report, where else are they going to get that exposure but at college?
(It’s probably not relevant to my point here, but some of those extraneous courses paid off for me in spades later. When I went in the army, that linguistics course was the reason I aced the language aptitude test. That gave me the opportunity to write my own ticket for training at the army language school. Because I’d already started studying Russian, I chose the one slot available in that program and I got to spend a year in Monterey, California, learning Russian for the army. Because I already had German and French on my record, the Russian got me assigned to West Berlin, the best duty station in the U.S. Army, where I spent two-and-a-half of the most interesting years I ever had before or since. If any of that hadn’t happened the way it did, I’d have ended up in Vietnam where the life expectancy of a Second Lieutenant in Military Intelligence was estimated at fifteen minutes after we hit the tarmac at Ton Son Nhut Air Base. Intellectual curiosity can pay off—but only if you indulge it. Which you can’t do if the school doesn’t offer a broad-based program of courses and activities. Isn’t that what liberal arts means?)
As for what’s going on now, I don’t get it. Children aren’t born anti-intellectual—that’s something they have to learn. In fact, they’re born curious; exploration is their natural bent. (Play-acting is also a natural impulse, as it happens.) If the students aren’t still that way when they get to college, then they’ve been maleducated before they got there. Now, perhaps the problem starts in junior high and high school, or even before, but the colleges and universities that get hold of those students when they’re 17, 18, and 19 are responsible for what they make of those new charges. If they’re going to call them educated men and women when they leave campus, they have an obligation to . . . well, educate them. College isn’t job-training school. And liberal arts colleges are especially obligated to produce well-rounded, cultivated young people. The graduates are supposed to know more about heaven and earth than were dreamt of in their philosophies when they arrived. Colleges are supposed to open up new worlds for their students, not just reinforce the knowledge—and ideas—they already had. My roommate, who wanted to be a doctor (and made it, by the way), was frustrated because he didn’t think he should have been required to take all those non-science distribution courses. I was frustrated for the opposite reason: I didn’t want to pick a major because I didn’t want to be pinned down. I wanted to find out about things I didn’t know anything about before I got to Lexington. I was lucky because someone showed me how I could do that while following the program at the same time. (My roommate wasn’t so lucky: he had to take those liberal arts courses he wanted to skip. I don’t know how he feels about that now.)
I don’t know how different one generation of students is from another. I doubt they’re different from birth. My experience in front of a college classroom suggests that if there’s a difference with respect to intellectual curiosity and the desire to go to new places between some students and others when they arrive, the main influence was probably their secondary educations. Some high schools, I observed, opened students up to new ideas and others kept them on a short tether. Already at a developmental crossroads intellectually, some students arrived at college ready to explore new ideas, others wanted only to enhance the ideas they already held, and still others were just timid about anything new or challenging. In any case, however, they were all dependent on the university—the teachers, other students, the administration, the academic and extra-curricular programs—to lead them, like a collective intellectual sherpa, on an educational mountain climb. It’s a rare student who can do that on her own. But no student, no matter how ready to take off or how self-motivating, can go anywhere if the school takes away the mountain altogether. George Orwell posited that people can’t think dangerous thoughts if they don’t have the words, so his dystopic police state regularly issued new dictionaries with fewer words than their predecessors. Fewer words, fewer thoughts. Well, in the university, the same truth holds: fewer offerings, fewer intellectual challenges. If Bob Youngblood is right and the 21st-century student comes to W&L with no exposure to live theater or any cultural experience, little intellectual curiosity, and a focus on partying and prepping for a high-wage Wall Street cocoon, then reducing the courses and activities that might challenge that attitude by offering some unlooked-for outlets for exploration and self-enhancement is the wrong way to respond. It’s the educational counterpart to Newspeak.
Now, I don’t think the university is deliberately trying to constrict students’ intellectual horizons by reducing their opportunities the way Orwell’s Big Brother deliberately reduces the possibilities of individual thought. The school’s administration sees its actions as fiscally responsible and mandated by budgetary constraints. They’re responding to student interest, they’ll say. There’s no point in offering activities and pursuits, paid for with money that can be used elsewhere, of which few students partake. That may be true, but is it right? Not from my perspective.
Ten years ago, the university published a brochure called A Future Worthy of Our Past. I was heartened to see that the arts continued to be a prominent focus of the university's goals, "an essential part of every student's experience" as President John W. Elrod (1995-2001) wrote. This statement echoes what W&L's most celebrated benefactor, George Washington, wrote to the trustees of Washington Academy in 1798: "[T]o encourage the Arts [has] ever been amongst the warmest wishes of my heart." Is the present university administration living up to the spirit of the W&L of President Elrod—much less Washington’s. When he dedicated the Lenfest Center, Elrod’s predecessor, John D. Wilson (1983-1995), evoked not just any arts figure but the greatest theater artist of the English-speaking world, William Shakespeare, declaring that artists "hold the mirror up to nature" even when they show man as a "poor, bare forked animal." Wilson, an avid theatergoer himself, knew that the performing arts, whose new temple he was launching, could "show us the truth about ourselves," even as they thrust us into "that uncomfortable terrain" of the unknown and the challenging. Not much of that can happen, however, if there’s no theater to hold up that mirror and show us those truths.
I deplore that everything has become a matter of business. I agree wholeheartedly with Bob Youngblood, who writes: "I consider theater an indispensable part of a university's offerings and think, the price tag be damned, plays should be put on." Under President Wilson, there was a sense that campus culture, especially theater, was an integral part of the life of the university. Wilson (whom my parents and I once met unexpectedly at a performance of Rent on Broadway) supported W&L theater out of conviction, not cost-consciousness or bean-counting. Some things just shouldn't be dependent on the bottom line.
Perhaps what’s needed right now is an educational counterpart to the program Kennedy Center president Michael Kaiser launched 15 months ago, Arts in Crisis. Kaiser travels the country and works the phones to help struggling non-profit arts organizations like theaters, orchestras, and dance companies keep their audiences, find new donors, and engage in more effective planning instead of cutting productions and programs. Kaiser, whose assistance costs the beneficiaries nothing, sees cutting back as a disastrous tactic. “I feel like the creativity has been beaten out of us,” Kaiser has said. Cultural organizations are “so scared about money that we’re afraid to do really interesting, innovative work.” Well, that’s what the theater departments of Washington and Lee and similar schools seem to be suffering, too. Ironically, one of the organization administrators Kaiser’s program helped sums up the Arts in Crisis message as: “You don’t have to be just cold and numbers driven.” If that works in the non-profit field, why can’t it apply to the educational arts as well? Why not an Educational Arts in Crisis to advise administrations like W&L’s in devising ways to keep their programs operating at full blast instead of curtailing them?
Well, aside from a personal disappointment, what’s the loss? At W&L and most liberal arts colleges, few students are theater majors or even arts majors. So how are we diminished if all those business majors, history majors, language majors, chem majors, poly sci majors, English majors, and so on, don’t get much (or any) exposure to theater or other arts? I’ve said this before (see, for instance, “Degrading the Arts,” ROT, 13 August 2009), and I believe it firmly enough to say it again: The arts are an important part of our society. Artists are society’s whistleblowers and night watchmen. Art tells us where we’re going off track and when we need to make a course correction. Given that we need these voices, we also need to guard against the elements in our culture who would suppress and censor them. The list of even the most recent attempts to keep artists from speaking to us is a long one. The way to prevent the forces of suppression from prevailing is to be sure there are citizens who understand the value of art and artists. The only way to assure that presence in society is to be sure that all graduates of colleges and secondary schools in this country have a fundamental grounding in the arts, to understand art and appreciate it as part of their lives, not an extravagance or a luxury that merely decorates our culture. It’s schools like W&L that are the training grounds for the citizens of influence and perspicacity, the women and men who will soon be making the decisions for the country at large. If there’s a hole in their education where theater and art should be, there will be a dangerous gap in society. Universities like Washington and Lee must insure that arts facilities like the Lenfest Center are no less anchors of our freedom than the journalism and law centers like Reid and Lewis Halls, two legacies of President Robert E. Lee. They can’t be if they’re dark.
I’ll end with a statement I’ve quoted before. It’s from artist and writer William Blake: "Degrade first the arts if you'd mankind degrade." Excising theater from the campus life at W&L is a perilous step toward degrading the arts. Is that a step a school that honors George Washington and Robert E. Lee should be taking?
[Aside from “Degrading the Arts,” mentioned above in passing, I’d like to direct readers to another column I’ve written that bears tangentially on this topic. I make brief reference to my concept of a liberal arts education here, and in 1986, I wrote an essay for the W&L alumni magazine describing the uses I’d made of my liberal education in the real world. I’ve revised that essay as “Liberal Arts in the Real World” and I’ve scheduled it to appear on ROT on 24 July. In a way, I see “Liberal Arts” as a companion to “Disappearing Theater.” I hope you will return to ROT and see if you agree with my vision.]
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